For
some reason the boards were different thicknesses this time, so I put
them all face down on the ground and nailed the support board to them (instead of nailing them into the support board.) Doing it that way insured that the exposed surface would be level:

I then stained the whole thing with some regular old woodstain:

I printed out a design on the computer, and spray glued it down. Then I used a razor blade to cut out the letters, and silhouettes and then painted them.

ETA: Lots of people have asked for more details about how I got the stencil onto the board (sorry I didn't include more photos) Here are the details:I googled "Three Wise Men Silhouette" and blew up the image in Photoshop. I saved it as a large PDF and had it print in sections.. (If you don't have photoshop, you can just tell your printer to print it at 300% (or however big you want it) on multiple sheets.) I did this the same way I did the turkey on this piece (so you can see what the split up printout looks like.)

I originally printed out the silhouettes/words on regular paper (but I would use cardstock if I had to do it again) and then sprayed the backside of the paper (dont' spray the wood or it will leave a residue) with repositionable spray adhesive (this is the kind of spray I used) to stick the paper to the board. Then I used an xacto knife to cut out the printed out letters so that you end up with a stencil. (You are cutting away the black printing.. leaving the white paper as a stencil.) Then I LIGHTLY blotted on paint to stencil the letters and finally I removed the paper (when the paint was wet so that you don't 'glue' the paper down with the paint after it dries).

The reason I left so much open space is that I knew I wanted to add lighted stars. I experimented with two strings of lights; LEDs and incandescents and I liked how the traditional lights looked. Much warmer (and they needed a much smaller hole) than the LEDs.

I drilled about 10 holes randomly around the pallet. The string I was using actually had 20 lights but I didn't want them to have to be too close together.

I inserted the sting of lights and held it in place with a little duct tape:

Here it is up on the mantle (in the transition between Fall and Christmas.) I wanted to make sure the number of stars was good and that they would show up against the dark lumber.. They were perfect: